Super Bowl Streaming: Will Live Sports Online Ever Get Better?

On Sunday you'll be able to watch Tom Brady and Eli Manning air it out on your computer screen—NBC is live-streaming the Giants-Patriots Super Bowl, making it the first Super Bowl offered online in the U.S. But thanks to the huge flow of cash going to show sports on television, Web streaming lags far behind broadcast TV. Will the situation ever get better for TV-less sports fans?

Most Read

Up until now, no Super Bowl has ever been shared in any way but broadcast television. But on Sunday, when the Giants and Patriots square off in Super Bowl XLVI, the big game will be streamed on NBC.com and to Verizon phones via the NFL Mobile app.

NBC's move is a boon for the increasing share of Americans who have ditched cable, and this year could have friends over for a streaming Super Bowl party. But as those cord-cutters know, live sports is one of the hardest things to replace when you finally quit the cable company, and possibly the top reason that more people don't. Hulu may be able to scratch your TV itch, but following your favorite team (especially if you live in its TV market) often means going without, streaming games illegally, or getting to know your local bartender on a first-name basis.

Yes, the Super Bowl has finally found the Internet. But why did it take so long—and will streaming America's favorite sport ever get better? If the state of streaming movies and television is complicated, then Internet sports licensing should be downright unsolvable. Yet most professional sports have embraced broadcast on the Internet. The problem is that the NFL is the worst offender of the bunch.

What's at Stake?

To be fair, the NFL has a lot more at stake than your average Internet-meme auteur. Its television rights are the most expensive sports and entertainment property in the U.S. CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN currently pay a sum of $20.4 billion to split up the NFL schedule among their networks. For 2014–2022, that figure will double to about $40 billion.

NBC has been streaming prime-time Sunday Night Football games for several years, and between 200,000 and 300,000 people watch this webcast. ESPN streams some games as well, such as the Monday Night Football telecast. But technically you need a cable subscription to access that streaming service. Flush with billions in TV-printed cash and contracts that last nearly a decade, there's little wonder that the NFL isn't blitzing for Internet streaming, but approaching it as tentatively as the movie studios have Netflix.

And, of course, behind all this money is a slew of restrictions and red tape.

The Madison Square Garden Network Provision

National network deals are only one tier of the problem. The next tier is regional networks—your local affiliate who buys rights to broadcast a city team.

It all started when Madison Square Garden Network began exclusively airing MSG events. The business decision made sense. If there was a fight that happened at MSG, why wouldn't the legendary venue want a piece of the distribution?

This move also meant that a venue became the first regional sports broadcaster in the U.S., and the tendrils of these exclusive contracts are felt to this day. Many games from the New York Knicks (NBA), Rangers, and Islanders (NHL), for example, are exclusive to MSG. The network pulls off this stunt by purchasing the rights from the sports franchises themselves, filming the games, and then licensing the channels to DirecTV, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, RCN, and Verizon FiOS TV. As Knicks and Rangers fans living in New York know all too well, MSG and Time Warner have been locked in a contract feud since New Year's Day over the fees to carry the MSG channel and air these teams' games on TV.

Most major regional broadcast contracts work similarly to the MSG model, and they are just as long and large as national broadcast contracts. The MLB recently sold 20 years (yes, a full 20 years) of Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim games rights to Fox Sports West. The cost? Three billion dollars—the kind of money that lets you buy Albert Pujols. The Texas Rangers entered a two-decade contract last year, too.

Regional broadcast licenses are a bit different with the NFL, however, due to the league's blackout provision. To keep ticket sales up, if a stadium doesn't sell out within 72 hours of game day, regional broadcasters can't air the game. The policy is controversial with superfans of unpopular franchises who find themselves unable to watch the games.

But What About the Internet?

While we have yet to see too many body-painted sports fanatics watching the big game over lattes at Starbucks, three of the big four sports leagues have been streaming games live for a while. Should you be willing to pay the lofty subscription fees, then NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and NHL Game Center Live offer live Internet access to all the regular season games you care to watch—unless you want to watch your local team. Thanks to the convoluted TV contracts, Chicagoans, for instance, are blacked out from watching Cubs or White Sox baseball games on MLB.TV—the channels that air those games don't want to lose eyeballs to the Web. (If your favorite team plays in a different town, then you're in luck.)

But the NFL is a gaping black hole. The NFL Network offers a subscription, but it only features live audio, not video. The league will let you download video of the games via its NFL Rewind package, but not until after that week's action has concluded. So, it's really only good for football die-hards who want to dissect game film, or those fans disciplined enough to ignore Sportscenter for a day and preserve the surprise for when they can finally watch the game.

The only relatively encompassing online solution is DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket. Formerly available just to DirecTV subscribers via satellite, it started streaming this season as an a la carte subscription to select devices, such as the PS3 and Android tablets. You'll pay handsomely for it, though: The Sunday Ticket streaming to the PS3 for this past season cost $340.

While most leagues have usurped their own licenses in the online realm—streaming every game despite television distribution, the NFL, with the biggest payday of them all, has chosen to let licensors take the leap to live Internet broadcasting on their own. NBC is streaming the Super Bowl to computers this year, not the NFL. And that decision makes NBC's licensing of the game that much more valuable (while keeping lucrative network bidding wars alive). But next year the game rotates to another network, which may or may not follow the Peacock's lead.

So Is There Any Hope for the NFL?

Hope? Of course there's hope. NBC is streaming the Super Bowl, the NFL's crown jewel. And if every other major U.S. sport has negotiated its own red tape, then the NFL, with the hottest commodity in sports, certainly can.

But don't delude yourself: TV money is going to keep most NFL games off the Web for a while. NBC has even said that its primarily motivation to stream Super Bowl XLVI, and accept the severely reduced rates for airing ads online, is that it thinks of web viewers as people who are already watching the game on TV and turn on their laptops to get extra angles.

Maybe football streaming will get better. But at the moment, the No Fun League has about $40 billion reasons to take its time.